Figuring Excel date format programmatically

I h开发者_Go百科ave a program that gets input in the form of an excel which it reads by querying (select * into a dataset).

The excel is created by the customer.

The excel contains a date column.

The problem is, that when looking into the dataset, the date column format is sometimes like mm/dd/yyyy and sometimes dd/mm/yyyy. (1/25/1970) (25/1/1970)

I guess it depends on the locale on the machine which the excel was made.

How can my program know what is the date format in the excel?

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Not sure whether your question is about output or input...
For output:
You did not mention the database type. But the rule is: make your dates the american way: mm/dd/yyyy. For Jet, I generally use Format(MyDate, ""\#dd\/mm\/yyyy\#"")
("\" is the escape character, it makes sure the next character is output "as is")
For input:
Try reading the cell format ? range("a1").NumberFormat
However on my PC, with French setup a date displayed as 15/2/2011 has a returned format = m/d/yyyy so little use here !